Associates of Sherlock Holmes Read online

  The Metropolitan Police detective force has suffered a certain amount of gentle lampooning at the pen of the Good Doctor and his literary agent, but there is no doubt in my mind that they are the best that can be obtained – for the money allocated by a niggardly Treasury. Their offices at New Scotland Yard administer a force that in total amounts now to over thirteen thousand, inclusive of their colleagues who perform the services behind the scenes, without which no substantial organisation can function, and they are no longer the well meaning but ill-organised handful of burly thief-catchers of Rowan and Bayne’s day.

  What’s that? Yes, I agree that it is a slight embarrassment that New Scotland Yard was itself founded upon an unsolved mystery. The torso of the woman dug up in the preparation of the foundations in 1888 has, I must admit, never been identified to a degree that would permit a case to be made in law. However, strictly between ourselves: the disappearance, in July of that year, of the Countess of Strathmore’s lady’s maid Jane from the Royal Box at the Wimbledon Championship – together with the Strathmore tiara, valued I believe at over seven thousand pounds for the gems alone – did not, I fear, end well for the cat’s-paw who allowed herself to be persuaded by the honeyed words of her eventual killer. The theft was a well-planned one involving the distraction of the sporting event in which I believe, if I recall correctly, the thirteenth Earl5 received a substantial defeat in the mixed doubles at the hands of the Renshaw brothers.6 I wonder if it was the failure of him and his partner on the lawns or the theft that rankled most when the family sat down to dinner that night. One day the hand of retribution will fall upon the shoulder of the personable Colonel Moran – but forgive me it was not my intent to raise old spectres, and I fear I have allowed myself to be diverted by your remark from the narrative you originally requested. My apologies: I fear even Homer may nod.

  On this particular Wednesday, Lestrade was going through reports of the beat officers from the Dulwich area looking for signs of crimes in the making. Indications that known criminals might be congregating, or for unusual spending which might tie any of the men known for such acts to the recent spate of robberies in that part of the city. You can well imagine the sort of thing that an intelligent man can glean from the chaff of the threshing, and Lestrade is by no means unintelligent. That he has not the flashy legerdemain of my brother, nor his accrued collection of bad habits, are both strengths in a man working with a regimented body: the crime solving engine that is the Metropolitan Police.

  Knowing that a tool is best used for the types of fastenings with which it is by its forging designed to engage, Lestrade did not attempt to lay before Sherlock any of his diligent work, but immediately handed him the most outré and time-consuming task of the many demanding his attention. The Yard does this now at my suggestion, for a study which I am carrying out concerning the management of time has indicated that the solution of a single high profile case, though often of political importance, does not accomplish as much for the general repose and security of society as the countless smaller crimes which can be solved or even averted by the correct placement of resources. As a self-motivated agent, my brother can be deployed at no formal cost, boasting that he never varies his charges except where he defrays them altogether (a claim I do not expect always holds true, if only because he is inclined to discount the odd princely gift from a grateful nobleman or woman). He is – when bored – perfectly happy to be set upon a goal, and will – at his own expense – dig into anything if it be sufficiently interesting.

  In this case it was the discovery of the body of Sergeant Major Lewis Rourke, absent without leave for five days from his Barracks – shot, it appeared, repeatedly in the chest, though not with any projectile from a normal rifle, and – this the matter that encouraged Lestrade to pass the case over to my brother – entirely clean shaven, despite his possession before his disappearance of both a large moustache, and formidable sideburns. No doubt this will eventually appear in print under such an attention-grabbing description as “The Adventure of the Shaved Sergeant” or perhaps “The Case of the Curiously Obsessive Murderer”, for, while to shoot a man more than once may be prudent, to shoot a single body twenty or thirty times suggests an unusual determination to ensure that the body breathes no more.

  To give him his due, Sherlock began sensibly enough, delegating Watson – whose military background and medical acumen enabled him to undertake both tasks – to interview the enlisted men at his Barracks as to the character and history of the deceased, and to review the report of the doctor who had examined the body.

  This produced the following information, which I can attest is completely true, so far as it goes: the sergeant major was – at forty-one years of age – an old campaigner and had served in India where his bald pate had been tanned by the Indian sun and his complexion had been given a florid hue that might otherwise have suggested drink. Thereafter he returned to serve as a drill sergeant and instructor of new recruits. He was regarded as being a fair man, not without a certain mawkish sense of humour, though still capable of enforcing discipline. Being himself a strict teetotaller, despite his appearance, he was but little inclined to overlook the minor japes and misdeeds committed by soldiers in their cups. Nevertheless he was well spoken of, and even those members of the regiment who had had occasion to be subject to military discipline under him appeared to have no onus for revenge, nor could a motive for his death easily be ascertained. He had been in fine fettle the day before his disappearance, and one of the gunners recalled that the sergeant had received a private letter, which had appeared, from the manner of its reception, to have conveyed good news.

  As to the body itself, aside from the shaving of the moustache and sideburns, it showed no injuries other than the wounds to the chest. This was unusual, because of the many impacts and the exceptional accuracy of the marksmanship. The wounds were shallow indents from small-bore grapeshot of the kind used for the sport of hunting birds, one or even a dozen of which would not have necessarily been fatal to a man but which, impacting in great numbers upon a small part of the sergeant’s chest – which had been bared – had produced, cumulatively, a cratered wound from which he had evidently expired, the proximate cause of death being loss of blood.

  At this point, if Watson were recounting the tale, there would no doubt be an erroneous theory of his coinage, there to be transcended by Sherlock’s own true account of the crime and the apprehending of the villain responsible. As I am standing in for Watson in recounting my brother’s exploit, perhaps you would care to supply your own surmise at this juncture?

  Ha, you know, that’s very Watsonian. You have a surprising talent for mimicry. Your theory is not an impossible one. You suggest, on receiving good news, perhaps of a legacy long wished for but also long pushed to the back of the mind, the sergeant major slipped from his teetotal pedestal – a position occupied most forcefully always by the reformed bibber. Finding him drunk, his men – not wishing him ill, but possessed of that boisterous spirit that can make a man as intolerable in peacetime as he may be invaluable in war – proceeded to shave him, leaving him to wake to the shame of a barefaced hypocrite. So far so good. But how then in this condition would you venture the man came to die? Presumably, you frame it as an accidental demise?

  You wonder if I have made any investigation into the forging of birdshot? Obviously it was the first thing to occur to me, as no doubt it was to Sherlock. The round shot is still used in fowling, although before the invention of the rifled barrel and the shell and cartridge it formed the ammunition of our armies as recently as forty years ago.7 I am sure it will not surprise you that the first suggestions that soldiers might fire anything other than a ball from their firearms was rejected by the British Board of Ordinance in 1826 on the grounds that spherical shot had been good enough for the last three hundred years! Such shot is forged by dropping molten lead through a copper sieve, and, as it falls through the air, it solidifies into a perfect sphere. The fall needed is a considerable one, as
the spherical shape is formed by the surface tension of the molten metal, and towers for the purpose of this forging exist at many metal works. As a point of interest there is such a tower,8 which opened nigh on sixty years ago, at the Lambeth Lead Works between Waterloo and Hungerford Bridges. Well within the distance that a drugged man or a body could be conveyed by hansom cab. As to the method of the inflicting of the singularly uniform and regular injuries then, I fancy we are in agreement.

  Your contention then is that his men, in ignorance of the tower’s function but aware of it as a landmark, conceived the idea of leaving the freshly shaved Rourke there, with a view to spying upon his awaking in such incongruous environs, bereft of his military moustache. Returning from a carouse to find him dead, as a result of some random accident sending a fusillade of shot down upon him where he lay, the men then panicked and, swearing their cabbie to secrecy, perhaps with bribes, carried the body to the wasteland where it was discovered and there left it – no doubt quaking in their boots at the thought that this crime might be brought home to them.

  So, no doubt, a kind-hearted Watson, inclined always to see the best in mankind, was willing to construe as an accidental result of high-spiritedness what was in actuality one of the vilest and most inhuman crimes to come to my brother’s, and hence my, notice.

  The fact of the body being exquisitely positioned to receive the fatal shot, with its breast bared, will not admit of accident.

  There are many reasons why a man might shave his own face, from vanity to disguise. There are many reasons why a man might shave the face of another man who will go on living, from the obvious one of being employed as a barber, to the japery you wished to suggest to me. But to shave the face of a man only with the intent of killing him thereafter?

  Only three theories occurred to my brother. The first, so as to facilitate the substitution of a bearded brother for a clean-shaven one, he quickly discounted. There was no such person in the case. Rourke was well known to many in the area, and both his superior officers and the men under him identified his body, despite the alterations. He had no dependants, was, so far as his men knew, unmarried, and in the event of his death, his goods were to be sold and the monies sent by a firm of lawyers to distant relatives in Ireland. Thus any question of substitution perhaps in pursuit of the suggestive legacy was ruled out.

  The second theory I myself favoured for a little while. I do not know if you are aware, but the presence of certain poisons taken over time can be proven by the subjecting of samples of body hair to certain reagents. As the hair grows out from the follicle it forms a record of the chemical composition of its – ah – native soil. Perhaps because of relative rates of growth, while hair abounds on the human body, the analytical technique is most effective when carried out upon the hairs of the head. Rourke’s baldness has already been remarked; I confess to wondering then if his beard and sideburns might have been removed in order to render less discoverable a cause of death that owed nothing to the impact of the falling shot. Sherlock also went along this blind alley – though for longer than I, working from pure logic alone. He haunted public houses, and discovered that the teetotal Rourke had, with other members of the Temperance League, lectured and argued with the regular drinkers and the publicans alike. In the process – for Rourke, despite his age and his baldness was in other respects a virile and even an imposing figure – he had conceived a friendship with a member of the Ladies League Against Alcohol, one Margaret Athol, on one occasion violently defending her from the attack of several inebriated young men who had taken drunken offence at her characterisation of their behaviour and determined to live down to the description she gave of it. There was an understanding between them, and while not officially engaged, she had given him a lock of her hair to keep, and he – recently enough for it to be of interest to Sherlock – had provided her with, of all things, a scented pillow favour, stuffed with aromatic herbs and cuttings from his own hair.

  Whereas you or I might perhaps have taken the lady into our confidence, given that this was a matter of murder, the vanity of my brother, which knows no bounds of good taste nor any check to his actions, led him to proceed to burglarise the lady’s boudoir in order to extract a lover’s keepsake which he then went on to render down to its constituent parts and subject to minute chemical analysis.

  The spectacle of my brother, diligently teasing apart tufts of a man’s whiskers and boiling them in a variety of reagents is, I confess, an amusing one – and I must not let it deflect my mind from the fact that this was – and remains – a very brutal crime. Nevertheless, albeit grimly, I am inclined to smile at the mental image. Even Watson – I have little doubt – must have chided him for this graceless action, the more so because it availed nothing in terms of practical proof.

  The theory was sound – something must have caused Rourke to lie unmoving while the hail of shot let out his life, and the absence of wounds at the wrists and ankles spoke against any physical restraint. Although the hair proved nothing either way as to poison, it might have been removed by an extremely careful assassin as a precaution. More likely though it spoke of a poison that required only a single dose, rather than a gradual building up of toxicity in the body. I do not share my brother’s interest in the minutia of murder, but any classicist must have been struck by the possibility of hemlock, and Sherlock considered the most likely poisonous agent to be conium maculatum – the poison which, in legend at least, was imbibed by Socrates. Hemlock tea can be given as a pleasantly tasting tisane – easily pressed upon a teetotaller. Its action is mild, and its predominant effect short of death is of a complete muscular paralysis. Under its influence, a victim – even if he had not in fact ingested a sufficiency to die – might well prove unable to stir a muscle to save himself from the slow drop, drop, drop of the fatal metal. Though unproven, my brother (and I) considered such a drug to be the likely means by which the victim was rendered helpless.

  You’re right; I did mention a third theory, other than disguise, or the removal of evidence, which might account for the removal of the sideburns and moustache.

  The third theory – though it had occurred to him – was not one that my brother felt able to pursue, involving as it did an emotional question of a certain delicacy. This task he forced upon Watson, despite the fact that Sherlock had rendered it almost impossible by his own felonious actions. The task was simply to interview Sergeant Rourke’s innamorata Miss Athol and ascertain whether or not his moustache and sideburns formed an impediment to their union, or were among his chief attractions. If the former, a simple chain of reasoning existed: learning of some improvement in his fortunes, the sergeant might well have been emboldened to propose – intending to do so he would have made the personal sacrifices necessary to present himself in the most aesthetically pleasing state. I am not myself much inclined to the pursuit of the fair sex – a man my size must be most enamoured of the pleasures of the table – but surely such an act as appearing clean shaven would charm an already interested party, who had professed a disquiet in connection with his appearance, almost as much as his increased financial prospects. The murder, and the mutilation of the moustache would then be either coincidences, or, if related, would be related by a causal chain in which both were set in motion by the letter, but without being themselves connected. Alternatively, if she especially favoured his appearance unaltered, then the change wrought upon it might represent a coup carried out by a rival, or unsuccessful suitor, with the murder in that model of events being again a parallel event, unless it – in itself – formed part of the spurned lover’s revenge.

  Watson was – for he possesses an excellent bedside manner and all the graces of a confiding physician – able to gain the young woman’s confidences, as Sherlock would not have done. She did indeed have a previously favoured man, a George Welby, who had been pressing his suite upon her for some time, but whom she had rejected when he proved to be a habitual taker of spirituous liquors. He had attempted to conceal this from her,
and indeed may have been inclined at one point to attempt to set drink aside and follow her example, but he had the misfortune (as it seemed) to be taken up by new friends and in their company so to wallow in the dens of the City, so that it could not but come to her attention. Her view of the sergeant’s moustache and sideburns was more than favourable, it seemed. It was one of a doting mother to a boy’s first facial hair. She approved of them heartily as a sign of a virile manliness which did not require gin to set it going, nor brandy to sustain it.

  This I think Sherlock should have been able to deduce without Watson’s evidence – for no-one of professing an opposing view would have wished for or, having been given unwished, cherished the form of keepsake that he had earlier stolen. I confess I do not know how Holmes and Watson resolved the matter of this theft; I imagine the surreptitious re-stuffing of the bag by Holmes with some hair from a recently deceased scoundrel in police custody, and its replacement under her pillow with some embarrassment by the comfort-bearing Watson. But perhaps, after all, she did not miss it. I hesitate to conjecture about female sensibilities.

  See how maddeningly my brother flounders between ideas, each one setting him on some active foray into events, when a cautious rational picture built up from item upon item of data would serve his turn so much more effectively. You can, I suppose, conclude his next step?

  Quite so. Learning that the suitor Welby – now his main suspect – was prone to drink and consorted with bad companions, he began a wholesale haunting of public houses and traveller’s inns, his lean body bulked up with cloth to a drunkard’s dimensions and his nose reddened with rouge. Ah, what it is to be the brother of a thwarted thespian. I’d wager your own brother gave you no such trouble, personally, being a mathematician – the mildest and gentlest of professions, next to your own railway work.9